Alternative Editorial: Time To Make Real
Six years ago, when we first launched The Alternative UK, we cited 'the imagination deficit' as a core reason for the brokenness of our political system. When we first began to open collaboratories in towns and neighbourhoods, we invited participants (drawn from the most diverse parts of the community we could reach) to re-imagine the future.
Partly shaped by our own project (over 2004-2006) to Re-imagine Social Work, we used a variety of tools (drama, music, constellations) in these collaboratories, enabling people from all reaches of the community to step into a future they could look forward to. We were not alone in this practice (see here for our extended coverage of this exciting field). Indeed, over this past five years imagination practices have become essential to those seeking a hopeful social change.
In so doing, we should never forget that imagination is a 'given' human resource - a function of the dreaming brain. Everyone has imagination and it is being constantly deployed, but with variable results. Within individuals, imagination is responsible for conjuring up bad possible outcomes from a neutral incident, as much as good ones. Depression can arise from a surfeit of imagination that constantly 'catastrophises' daily life: trapping a person into inescapable ruminations on fears and regrets.
When a socio-political-economic system robs citizens of their autonomy and agency, it is common for the imagination, both individual and collective, to run riot. We try to find a way to make sense of the mess we are in and plot some escape. What used to be a very personal and private activity - the imagination constantly rehearsing alternative lives – started to become, in the internet era, a very public practice.
Today we're on a huge political spectrum, with carefully worked out fully automated luxury communism at one end, and free-associating, conspiracy-led, crisis deniers at the other. In between we might find all sorts of solar punks, ecocivilisationists, and communities setting up their own governance systems to experiment with radical democracy (eg Rojava).
Of course, each of the poles in this spectrum are accused of being unreal by the other: living in the world of their imagination without proof that the world desired can come into being. But not all are equally unreal. While some are a relatively untethered field of possibility - we can do anything if we just believe it! - others are born of an evolved understanding of what it means to be human, to be interdependent with the natural world of sentient beings and resources, facilitated by technology.
What we have collectively learnt from the past 30 years - and more - is that human beings are not straightforward, society is not easy to control and the ability of the planet to regenerate itself matters more than we thought. There are no simple solutions. We are not homo economicus, only requiring minimal material security to begin the path to flourishing.
Nor can we easily re-programme ourselves for a more complex reality.
Nevertheless, our capacities for agency are brutally frustrated by our political system. We no longer live either locally or globally, but cosmolocally - able to take knowledge and methods from the entire globe, but also manipulable by the same planetary systems, right where we are.
No exercise of the imagination should exclude this agency when dreaming a future into being. It should not be simply new behaviour that is being elicited - or nudged - at this time. We have to be designing for new ways of being, within different kinds of spaces for development and relationship, within new socio-political-economic power structures (including the media) that can hold this evolution. And all at the same time.
When we re-birthed The Alternative Global last week, we initiated four new incubators – by which we mean spaces for something new to grow and materialise. We might alternatively have called them pupa or even wombs - the emphasis being to offer a multi-dimensional space, with multiple forms of agency, many different material substances, to integrate and take concrete form.
Of course, co-creators will choose which incubator appeals to them most - but all four need the other three to be able to realise our common future imagined. They are not like three organisations that need to be strategically aligned to achieve a common goal, but more like four aspects of a living system. In a physical body that might look like the liver, heart, stomach and brain whose successful interdependence adds up to a body that flourishes. The failure of any one of these micro-systems causes failure in the whole.
None of these incubators start in a vacuum. Like a butterfly in a pupa or a child in a womb, there is already a lot of DNA-like information present. Why and how are these micro-systems taking shape here at The Alternative Global? After six years of activity - systems convening, prototyping CANs and relationship making - we are setting the scene and inviting co-creators who recognise what we have seen emerging and want to develop it. If you have been reading this newsletter and editorial regularly then you are a likely candidate.
That's not to say these are straightforward assembly jobs either. For any of these projects to survive incubation, we must first of all create a context - an environment - within which they can come to life. In real terms, this means conversations that acknowledge what we are unlearning from the dominant system and reconnects us to something deeper - the energy we need to leap forward. This can take the form of new language, new forms of value, new design and practices. Without a radically creative discourse, nothing original can survive.
On our website you will see that we start each incubator with a series of questions to open the conversation. Below is a brief description of their starting points.
First Incubator: Ecocivilisation through the CAN of CANs
This incubator builds on the idea that we are living in an era of waking up to our own individual and collective agency. That waking up is reconnecting us – sporadically for the most part - to our own psyche, our society and the wider planet. It's not enough anymore to follow a leader and agree to their agenda wholesale. Because we are active on the internet, we are all vulnerable to being emotionally and materially manipulated.
Instead, we need to open up physical spaces, into which we can bring our waking selves, hear others and move into relationship, beyond the old divides. Ideally these spaces occur in your own local community, allowing ongoing engagement and relevance. At the same time, they are inevitably cosmolocal - taking part in the global environment, virtually and intellectually.
Our discovery, early in the AUK journey, was that this is much more than traditional community organising which focuses on care and problem solving (for which we can be thankful). We found that there were already many forms of community action networks (CANs) opening up that combined social enterprise, new economies and participatory decision making. But these also tended to attract people who shared values and left a lot of people alienated.
To become capable of delivering an ecocivilisation, our CANs need to be bio-diverse too - emphasising new forms of input and intelligence into our spaces, causing transformation. Community agency networks include new forms of energy - through diverse cultures, forms of gathering, new technology and artistic practice - drawing in a much wider polity.
One way of causing acceleration towards ecocivilisation is to connect the many stages of CANs to each other and help them share tools, practice and stories - engendering acceptance and enjoyment of the whole field. Through inviting whole human beings into spaces for self-realisation, we can make manifest our shared social potential: we can get whole system transformation.
Second Incubator: A New Political System
We started The Alternative UK with the statistic 'only 2% of people are members of political parties. What are the 98% doing with their time and money?' Over the past six years we have been describing how, in the era of waking up we are still locked into consumerism (ref), our thinking polarised by the mainstream media and further fragmented by social media.
Our inability to self-organise beyond this historic powerlessness leaves us in hock to electoralism - the outcome of casting one vote every five years for parties that are in constant tribal battle. What could be worse than half the country invested in the failure of the other half?
This second incubator steps away from the party-political system. It sees new possibilities arising from the growing phenomenon of people coming together across divides to experience a different kind of agency. As CANs give rise to new socio-economic micro-systems, so they also offer the possibility of new forms of governance arising in communities. Bits of method, both digital and behavioural, from pol.is to Citizen or People's Assemblies and the AntiDebate are enabling subtle, deliberative civic engagement, capable over time of decision making. These are the early technologies and procedures of a new democracy, arising outside of the formal system.
What would happen if the CAN of CANs constituted itself as a polity, and designed a system of regular engagement with the people occupying those communities? Not snap polls or liquid democracy, but a way to consult people thoughtfully over a period of time, allowing development of understanding? If constituted in some way - whether as a global club, or within a new constitution - this body of people, open to everyone to join, can act as a parallel polis to the established forms of power. Like two legs, working in parallel with the state to support the one body of society. Standing outside the party-political bubble, it could offer people a chance to come together, relate to each other and be heard. The energy of what they are generating becoming the attractor for wider transformation of the whole system.
Third Incubator: Future Being - A New Practice For Transformation
To move from the present – call it polycrisis, permacrisis or metacrisis - to a future we can all anticipate cannot be easily achieved. It requires more than external changes, promising new outcomes. We need to identify a way of being in our daily lives that can hold our vision for the future as a constant possibility. Like an athlete hoping to break a record, we need to be able to embody the possibility of success before we hear the starting gun. What kind of practice can help us reach and then sustain that constant potential?
In what ways has mindfulness been that practice over recent years - taken up by millions worldwide? It's certainly a way to calm our anxiety and reconnect us to a sense of self - one that may have been hjacked by the public space most of our lives. But is mindfulness enough to help us face the collective crises of inequality, environment and loss of well-being?
Is there another dimension to this inner practice that can help us transform our society, from one of trauma and slavishness to the system, and instead towards freedom and creativity? How do we connect the process of “waking up”, to our conscious creation of a better civilisation? It sounds like a high bar. But if we can win that battle within ourselves, we are on our way to realising our human potential for the sake of all living things.
Fourth Incubator: News From Planet A
Of the four incubators, this has the most track record to call upon. In some ways, our weekly newsletter is already the news from Planet A - with items drawn from many elements of a new socio-economic-political system already appearing within our global networks. But how can we build more robustly this form of news gathering, and design the tech that allows far more people to participate in meaning=making at this time?
The task of this new media system is to be able to convey, from all we observe, that there genuinely is an alternative to the breakdowns we are witnessing together. That the future has promise and can be realised, if we consider these already-viable alternatives
However, as Marshal McLuhan suggested, the form that media takes is the message that it can carry. What new forms of media - or what ecology of forms - can do better than we are able to right now? We embedded split-screen montages of #corecore videos at the top of on our incubator pages. These manage to convey a 'feeling' about this current age that a solely textual blog would find it hard to achieve.
Whether you feel called to join one of our incubators or not, our move into activating more of the potential we revealed last year on Planet A is no longer an act of imagination, but of realisation. At the beginning of Year 7 for The Alternative Global and moving into the fourth year of this important decade we hope you will support our transformational ambition, in whatever way you can.